Avidly Activates: The origin story

My regular exposure to superhero movies and the whole Marvel and DC universe is via my son. Be it Lego Marvel on his Switch or episodes of Spidey and His Amazing Friends on Disney+, it's relentless. Just like the endless questioning of his uncle (a superhero aficionado) about the goodies and baddies' backstories. The characters he's playing with and pretending to be are a lot more interesting when he knows why they're the way they are. That's the real pulling power of a good origin story and why prequels get made by Hollywood all the time.

As we approach Avidly Activates UK 2024, here's the origin story of where the name came from and why the event previously known as Love Inbound has a whole new name, look and feel.

And you can meet the creative mind who helped pull it all together.

A quick chat whilst making a drink turned into something special

Truth be told, we weren't totally sold on 'Love Inbound' once we joined Avidly.

It felt like a very Digital 22 brand with the core colours being the Digital 22 purple pallette. The animated version of the logo even incorporated a '22' turning into the love heart within the Love Inbound logomark.

Back in February, whilst both making a drink in the breakout room, Emily or Paul mentioned to the other that it was 'probably time to start thinking about what to do with the Love Inbound event name.'

As is the way, an impromptu ideation session started and both realised it then needed a full rebrand with a new logo, email templates, sign-up page, slide deck for on the day, rollups...

Ah, yeah, that's why it didn't happen last year. A lot of thought and work was needed.

'Wait a minute, let me go and get Bilal'

Luckily, Bilal was free.

He's an Avidly designer and one of the most creative minds you could hope to meet.

A quick chat over a coffee machine turned into a 90-minute brainstorm about what to call the event - and then some.

He asked question after question.

'What's different about the event now?'
Loads of stuff, it's got a new venue, different formats, and more going on and it's all about making sure the full day has more of those key moments that activate something in the audience: confidence, a new skill, a new connection.

'Is this a standalone thing just for the 'Love Inbound' audience?'
No, certainly not. It's what our 4x Manchester HubSpot User Groups are culminating towards. It's what our webinars and newsletter will promote. In short, it's the headline act in our event schedule for 2024.

'So it's not just a one-off?'
Heck no. It's something we want to take to our German audience and put alongside Nordic Growth Summit (our paid event in Oslo which launched earlier in the year).

'What budget do we have?'

'Will speakers promote it?'

'Where will you be advertising it?'

He went on and on.

Each question created different ideas. Names for our newsletter, ideas for other events, content for our blog. Podcast topics. Ideas for merch and swag. Poster and leaflet content.

But something was an ever-present theme throughout it all.

The desire to 'activate' the audience.

Every content stream, each event topic, each email campaign... it was all about Avidly activating something in those attending or watching or reading.

In the case of this year's main in-person UK event, it was all about activating your customer-led sales and marketing.

Something crucial as organic traffic declines, users go dark with their social habits and attribution gets harder and harder by the week.

Avidly Activates was born

Avidly Activates was born. You can head to it's dedicated page and check out Bilal's beautiful design work by pressing this button: